There In Time

It’s an Independents exhibition curated by Jo Moore at the Bridewell Gallery, and I’m one of three artists exhibiting alongside Mark Simpson (whose photograph is above) and Emily Speed.

The title responds to a kind of palimpsest, time-lapse quality we feel all the work shares. As Jo wrote in an email yesterday:

But that is what I imagine when I think of the exhibition; Mark’s asylums degrading, plants weaving swiftly up the walls and through the windows; Emily’s cities rising up and then dissolving, unravelling, unfolding; the people of Kensington passing like flickers of light across the streets, leaving only the faintest thumbprint trace of memory and experience, filmy and translucent.

I’m going to make some new pieces for the exhibition based initially on my Highgate Maps project of 2004, which was the work the Jo initially contacted me about. The most involved piece for There In Time will involve interviewing residents of the area as they annotate local maps with their memories and personal geographies, and DAT recording their explanations. I’ll have to go up a couple of times in the coming month to meet some of the community groups Jo’s been contacting and get to know the area a little so I have a better idea of how to start.

For the exhibition I’ll present both the annotated maps and audio extracts from the commentaries, with the sound edited together into a barely intelligible texture which will play from multiple speakers. I have to think about how to present the maps in a way that’s analogous to the effect of the sound. It might be that I ask everyone to draw their annotations on tracing paper, and then display them without the original maps they were traced over, perhaps all overlayed. Put together, all the images would lend themselves to book form too, maybe later on.